Florida Audio Expo 2020 Q&A

It’s not always possible to chat with everyone at an audio show, so I did my best to stop and talk to everyone I could at the Florida Audio Expo 2020 to find out more about some of the leaders and great minds of the high-end audio world. I would like to personally thank Luke, Tom and Gary for taking the time to answer my questions. Enjoy!

Q – What makes your company stand apart from everyone else?

VTL is serious about sound, and everything that we do is about how to make the most musically engaging products for serious music lovers.

Q – What did you think of the Florida Audio Expo 2020, will we see you next year?

The FAE this year was high in enthusiasm and positive appreciation of the great effort that Salon 1 went to show people what is possible with a stereo system. I am fairly certain that we’ll be back next year.

Q – Tell me about your flagship product at the show this year.

The VTL products shown in the Salon 1 room were from each of our model ranges, balanced together to make a high-performance system that was seemingly able to play anything well.

The top of the line is our TL-7.5 Series III Reference Linestage, and it is a hybrid design that is as transparent and neutral as we know how to make an audio component. It is fully balanced (as are the power amplifiers) and was transparent and revealing to the three sources that we fed into it, with limitless headroom from the use of relay volume control. It is also able to drive long cables, so that the turntable can be placed far away from the loudspeakers, which is important if you want to avoid sonic interference from the speakers. The precision-regulated power supply kept all AC noise out of the preamp.

The TL-7.5 drove the MB-185 Series III Signature monoblocks, which at 300 watts per side, have the power to drive and control the Wilson Sasha DAW speakers. The power amplifiers are our most powerful amplifiers that use EL34 tubes, which are very sweet-sounding, and also have very good bass punch.

The TP-2.5i Performance phono stage is designed to amplify a phono signal with extremely low noise and with a musical balance that makes it really fun to listen to.

Q – What new product are you looking forward to in 2020?

We just started shipping our TP-6.5 Series II Signature phono stage, which is a step up from the TP-2.5i that we showed in the system mentioned above. The latest iteration of the TP-6.5 is a great improvement on the first version, and offers quieter drive for very low output phono cartridges.

Q – What’s next for your company in 2020, exciting new products?

Probably a new power amp, but we’ll have more to say about this further into the year.

Q – Burn-in or no burn-in, what are your thoughts?

Burn-in is critical – we even saw the system settle and improve as the show went on, and these were all already burned in components. There is no doubt about the sonic improvement, although I doubt we have the tools to measure a difference.

Q – Tell me about what got you into high-end audio?

My father was a recording engineer and serious audiophile, and it has been inculcated to me from a very young age.

Q – What’s your personal favorite piece of audio gear?

Hard to choose, but certainly the top of the line VTL gear, our Wilson speakers, Nordost Odin 2 cables, and probably most of all our Lyra Etna cartridges. If I had to choose I would probably lean towards a reel to reel tape machine playing half-inch tape, but this is a hard reach for most people.

Q – For someone who is new to high-end audio, what advice would you give them?

First, go to as much live music as possible, so that you know what it is supposed to sound like.

Do your homework and experiment to see what you can do to get the most out of your system, and trust your hearing to tell you whether what you are doing is really better, rather than just different.

Q – Last question, what are your social media handles?

n/a – just don’t have time

Q – What makes your company stand apart from everyone else?

I back up all my specs and claims with science and measurements. I deliver more measurements and spec details than anyone else in the industry. I get the sense that many are fed up with the snake oil and would rather have straight talk, so I do my best to deliver straight talk.

Q – What did you think of the Florida Audio Expo 2020, will we see you next year?

Attendance Friday was good. I haven’t decided if I’m going next year. I might.

Q – Tell me about your flagship product at the show this year.

HPA-1 headphone amp. You can find the full description.

Q – What’s next for your company in 2020, exciting new products?

Yes. 🙂 I’ll make another headphone amp available this year. The specs and features are still fluid, so I can’t go into detail, but it should be pretty amazing.

Q – Burn-in or no burn-in, what’s your thoughts?

For vacuum tubes, burn-in is definitely a thing. You can measure the operating point (bias point) shift during the first hours of operation. For solid-state circuits, burn-in is honestly marketing.

Q – Tell me about what got you into high-end audio?

I love precision circuit design. To me, precision equals high-end. My years at National Semiconductor and Texas Instruments where I designed precision amplifiers and precision timing circuits set me up for that rather nicely.

Q – What’s your personal favorite piece of audio gear?

My Audio Precision APx525 audio analyzer.

Q – For someone who is new to high-end audio, what advice would you give them?

Learn as much of the underlying physics and electronics as you can. It’ll help you identify the honest vendors who offer a quality product.

Q – Last question, what are your social media handles?

Facebook: Tom Christiansen Audio
Audio Science Review: tomchr
Audio Circle: tomchr
Head-Fi: tomchr

Q – What makes your company stand apart from everyone else?

I think there are a number of important aspects about our company that make us unusual, if not unique. First is that I believe more than any other brand, we have proven that high reliability and superb sound quality are not mutually exclusive. So many products in our space are designed like race cars that can run 500 laps around the track (or sometimes not) before they need some time in the garage. We have thousands of products in the marketplace produced even before you and I were born that are still in daily use. That’s not to say our products never break, but it’s comparably rare. In the event Bryston equipment does need service, we do our best to provide it quickly, completely, and with integrity. Our twenty-year warranty means that many service incidents are at no cost to the customer. Our professional studio clients rely on our equipment to do their jobs, and our enthusiast customers just want the pleasure of listening to music or watching movies without the frustration of temperamental equipment. We approach product engineering in a manner grounded in science where we can prove success on the test bench (and the service bench) and don’t have to lean exclusively on speculative claims or the blessing of a golden ear to know whether or not we’re doing good work.

Q – What did you think of the Florida Audio Expo 2020, will we see you next year?

It seemed like a great show. Our exhibit was standing room only for all of Friday and much of Saturday. Even Sunday had steady traffic all the way through closing which is unusual. Attendees were a fun group. I especially enjoyed time with a foursome who came in on Sunday that listened to a lot of jazz with me. We seemed to have similar tastes and traded some recommendations. Besides the joy of introducing Bryston to folks or reminding them that we’re only getting better, what makes shows fun for me is the pleasure of sharing great music with new friends, and there was plenty of that at the show. I can never accurately predict the future, but I imagine we’ll be back.

Q – Tell me about your flagship product at the show this year.

Unlike what you’ll see from us in Montreal next month, we tried to build a room that everyone in the halls could very easily imagine owning. We didn’t pack our room full of plants, acoustic treatments, darken it, or jam it full of gear. Our room was clean, light, airy, fun and easy to understand. Our simple system included our new BDA-3.14 DAC / Streamer and our B135 Cubed Integrated amplifier plus a pair of small F502 floorstanders from Fyne Audio. The B135 Cubed is a 135 watt-per-channel integrated that owes no apologies. It is clean, powerful, dynamic and has a black background that makes it an awesome matchup for the relatively high sensitivity F502 speakers. Even when we played the system loudly, there was plenty of dynamic range. Quiet passages showcased wall to wall sound-staging and images that could hang in space. $6495 prices it out of budget territory, but I’d much rather listeners compare it to separates from other brands. That it takes up so little room means that you won’t have to compromise your room design to integrate a stereo into your home either. The B135 is a real treat.

Q – What new product are you looking forward to in 2020?

The BDA-3.14 is picking up momentum quickly. We’ve been fortunate enough to earn a good reputation for sound quality with our digital audio equipment over the years, but prior to this new product, listeners would have to purchase a separate digital player and separate DAC to really get the Bryston experience. After the Montreal show last year, we decided that the most economical way to create a one-box solution would simply be to build our BDP-Pi digital player solution into our existing flagship DAC, the BDA-3. That’s how the BDA-3.14 was born. Naturally, it took some work to optimize the interface between the two and to write the software necessary to manage both halves simultaneously. But what resulted was a fully digital front end that performs as well as the separates without having to deeply cut features. In fact, we added a volume control feature so those who do not need analog inputs can drive an amplifier directly. That’s how one of my home systems is configured. The BDA-3.14 is a $900 savings over a BDA-3 / BDP-Pi combo.

Q – What’s next for your company in 2020, exciting new products?

We definitely have some great new products coming this year. I wish I could tell you more about them today, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun of a big reveal!

Q – Burn-in or no burn-in, what’s your thoughts?

I don’t know. I think it’s very hard to reliably test. At the very least, it is product specific. Proper blind listening should be conducted to determine the impact of burn-in on products, but ultimately, I’m not sure how consequential the findings would be to us as consumers. I encourage prospective customers to seek in-home demos from dealers in order to see what living with it is like. With loudspeakers, it’s not difficult to measure the impact of break-in. T-S parameters change as suspensions flex. Voice coil impedance changes with temperature. Some amplifiers perform differently at different temperatures. Until science has conclusively identified all the possible burn-in modalities and how or if they impact sound, it will remain a religious debate in our business. Some people swear by it, others don’t. A reviewer recently remarked that the 4B Cubed he was testing took 6 months to burn-in. That’s much longer than we’ve heard before. Ultimately, I don’t feel like it’s my place to delegitimize somebody else’s experience with our product or anyone else’s, but I don’t have the evidence to support the claim one way or another.

We burn all of our products in the factory for 100 hours after assembly but prior to shipping not so that clients get the experience of a nicely broken-in component but as a quality control mechanism. If we can operationally stress products and find faults before they ship, the likelihood of field failures decreases dramatically.

Q – Tell me about what got you into high-end audio?

Even as a little kid, I was a passionate music fan. My parents loved country music, so we always had that around. As a teen, I listened to a lot of grunge and college-rock type stuff. I loved making mixtapes for friends (girls especially!) and knew I did a great job when they were played so much, the cassettes broke in their cars. All the while, I wanted better and better playback equipment. When I was 14, we bought a family computer and I angled for the upgraded speaker package with a subwoofer. One of my college jobs was working at Best Buy which meant a generous employee discount. I bought the most expensive Yamaha receiver I had access to and the most expensive JBL speakers I could get my hands on. I was hooked! Working as the music director for my college radio station, I would sometimes get misdelivered mail from the jazz station upstairs. That really opened my ears to jazz and experimental music that I didn’t even know existed beforehand. Then I eventually worked for local bands, and that sealed the deal for me. At my university, we had a really top-quality recording industry program from which I graduated including three fully-featured studios (they have five now plus a mastering lab). One of those studios had some large Boxer monitors where each driver was powered by a channel of Bryston. That was an epiphany for me. Listening to good mixes on that system felt like being on the holodeck from Star Trek! It occurred to me that my job was then to learn how to mix records not just to bang in cars, but to transport listeners somewhere else. Once out of university, I got a job with a high-performance speaker manufacturer, and a few years ago moved over to Bryston.

Q – What’s your personal favorite piece of audio gear?

Probably my Bryston BDP-3. I love the way it works and sounds. I have one in my upstairs system in my home office, so I literally listen to it every day. Because it’s controlled through a web browser, it is just as easy to use on my computer as it is my phone. I often listen to one of our local public radio affiliates during the day, but I’ll take breaks and put on an album recommended by a friend or music publication. Or sometimes I’ll listen to an old favorite. The interface for it makes it easy to find music that’s similar to what I’m listening to, and there is an intelligent random feature that will pull songs from my library that I may have forgotten about. I remember prior to having a file-based playback system that I would sometimes get into ruts where I would listen to the same group of CDs or albums often even though I had a fairly large collection.

Q – For someone who is new to high-end audio, what advice would you give them?

Don’t go crazy with upgrade fever. Take the time to get what you really want rather than making a bunch of sideways jumps. Remember that you got into this in service of music, not gear worship. Be a patient buyer and a student of audio. Seek advice, but consider the source. I think as a new high-performance audio enthusiast, it’s really easy to get overwhelmed with the massive amount of brands out there that each preaches a different gospel. Take your time listening to equipment, comparing it to other equipment and to your experience and expectation for what is right. No way are myriad accessories going to have a bigger impact on your enjoyment of music than good-quality speakers, amplifiers, and electronics. A new preamp or interconnect isn’t going to overcome bad speaker placement. Read Floyd Toole and the other masters. Learn how loudspeakers interact with rooms. Don’t make excuses for bad sound. Good systems cost serious money and they should bring you joy through the pleasure of music discovery and appreciation.

Q – Last question, what are your social media handles?

We’re primarily on Facebook at BrystonLtd. Instagram @bryston_ltd and I’m on Reddit at /u/wgdayton

That’s all we have time for today, we may have some more interviews coming in so stay tuned! And if you have any ideas for questions, please leave them in the comments below! If you were at the show and didn’t get a chance to talk with me send me an email at mailto:[email protected]. Thanks, and I hope you enjoyed the article!